Something Related to a Project…

Not that this has to do with much of anything, but I happened to shoot this on Sunday morning on the way to shoot some other pictures for a project.

I’m not going to use this one in the project, because I already have my quota (one) of motion-blurred pictures — but this is still a fun image.

For the technically minded, here is the photo-geeky stuff:

The Nikon D300 camera was set up on a Benbo Trecker tripod — the middle leg was set into the Outback’s forward cupholder. The other two legs rested on the rear floor, one on either side of the hump. Lateral movement was controlled by a couple of bungee cords to the front seat head restraint rods. If you know anything about Benbo tripods, you’ll understand why this works.

I used a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens. The focal length was 11mm and the aperture was f/5.6. Focus was preset at manual.

The camera’s ISO was set to 800. The aperture priority mode was used, with 5-shot auto-bracketing. The brackets were 1 f/stop apart. The exposure for this shot was 1 second controlled by a Nikon electronic shutter release (squeeze and hold until all 5 shots were taken.

The image was recorded in RAW (NEF) so that I would have access to all the image data recorded. Post processing was done in Adobe PhotoShop CS4. Color temperature as adjusted to 6550K. The white line on the right was used to set the white value in Curves. Noise reduction was with Noise Ninja. I Smart Sharpened it a little.

My biggest surprise was that even with the slow 1 second shutter speed and the pretty dodgy camera installation, the image is sharp enough to use — at least for the web. Certainly not razor sharp, but sharp enough.